What’s Worse Than Winter? Only One Thing: Betrayal

Leave New England If You Must, But Please Don’t Move to Florida

Recently I received a disturbing email from my father, currently vacationing in Florida. Or “wintering” is I suppose the word. He said he had made an offer on a house.

My father is 78, or thereabouts. He is tall, rangy, with an unruly head of hair and a beard that has been with him since his 20s. Restless by nature, he has always been prone to making offers on houses. He’s also proven to be rather good at it, discovering a string of interesting homes for my family over the years, and, when my sister and I left for college, for himself and my mother. My mother tolerates my father’s restlessness because what else can you do?

This time however the news of the house offer, received in the bitter depths of winter, came somewhat as a betrayal. Especially now that my parents and I live in the same town. How this proximity came to be is not unusual. When my children began to appear the grandparents did also, drawn by the sweetness, like bees. Within a year of my second child’s birth they sold their house overlooking the Sakonnet River and bought another, a five minute walk from mine, overlooking a field of alfalfa.

We’ve come to rely on them over the years — not that they help much with the kids, for they are old grandparents (more my fault than theirs), and keeping my kids in line isn’t easy even for me. Still, winter is made more bearable just knowing that others are suffering with you. On Sunday nights we gather over casseroles to commiserate and review the perennial questions. Shoveling vs. hiring a plow, wood stove vs. mini-split, bourbon vs. scotch, etc. We forge through together. In New England, family values are climate enforced.

Several years ago however my parents began lighting out for warmer climes soon after the last holiday carillon faded and the cold silence settled and the jeweled lights on the yew bushes began to seem less festive decoration than a kind of glowing moat against the dark.

To be sure, in winter the desire to be elsewhere is entirely natural. To dream of faraway beaches, fingers stoved in the hot sand, sun on your eyelids as little waves nibble the shore. We’re all entitled to our consolations. Not pleasures mind you, but consolations. In New England these consolations as a rule tend to be modest, never entirely subverting the suffering they make tolerable. It is because of their modesty that we hold them close, reciting them to ourselves like a rosary. Wood fires. Black nights. Hot tea. Warm socks.

Even the occasional vacation is permissible — indeed welcomed insofar as vacations provoke envy among the rest of us, and another round of weather-related grousing — a tentpole of winter conversation.

But each year my parents’ vacations grew longer, their destinations farther south, until finally, with a kind of dire inevitability, they ended up in Florida.

Florida. New England’s garish antipodes. Undisciplined, unreflective, excessive, vulgar, grotesque. Fount of endless news stories involving aliens, naked people, and loaded grenade launchers. The opposite of New England in just about every respect. Just try picturing Emily Dickinson there. Poetry is scarce in Florida — except for the accidental kind that turns up in the headlines.

Florida woman gets married to a ferris wheel

named Bruce,

after failed relationships with an airplane

and a train.

Florida man bitten by shark, punched

by monkey (twice),

struck by lightning, bitten by snake.

Meat rains down in Fort Lauderdale.

Yes, I am a New England snob. Which is another way of saying that I sometimes count my ignorance as intelligence. In fact, I didn’t even know where my parents were — east coast, west coast, north, south. I didn’t want to know. For knowing wouldn’t help get me through the winter.

Whatever. They would do what they would do. As people grow older, I’d tell myself, certain allowances must be made. The consolations may increase in scope but then again so too does the suffering. Overall, the proportion remains more or less the same. That’s the important thing.

But this… to actually buy a house… to invest the place with your identity… Surely this was betrayal. Flirt with Florida if you must. But for heaven’s sake don’t actually move there.

Several things helped me forgive my parents, in the end. And one of them was not the invitation to use the house when we wanted. Because that would mean learning its location.

The first was that it was not, after all, intended to be a permanent residence. They would still live in New England for most of the year, and only retreat in deep winter. They were not, in other words, renouncing New England, with its monochrome winters and muddy springs, summer glories and autumn melancholies, entirely.

The second was that, as good as my father is at finding houses he’s still terrible when it comes to actually pulling the trigger. He is not, after all, a profligate person. He is a born New Englander, raised in thrift, dedicated in his marrow to certain principles of merit and economy — and at the same time he (like most New Englanders) is always on some level at war with them. My father’s nose for houses, in fact, may simply be a subconscious intuition for how this conflict might finally be brought to a head.

Of course, it never does come to a head, because the conflict is not of the resolvable kind. My father could not escape his thriftiness any more than he could escape his desire to escape it. To see him wrestle with the house decision therefore was to see him spitted yet again on his own identity — always a moving sight, and one that cannot help evoke compassion.

“Do you really want this thing?” my mother asks.

“Oh, I don’t know…” my father says.

“Well, why not? It could be fun.”

“I’m just thinking of all the work.”

This from a kind of teleplay my mother sent, describing their conversations. It continues, my mother speaking:

“Maybe you’re right. We can always keep renting.”

“But it’s right on the water!”

“Okay, let’s go forward.”

“But what about the mold, the windows, the hot water heater?”

“You’re right. Let’s not.”

Etc.

Ultimately, my father’s redemption was owed to the house itself. On reflection, I should have known that he would never have been seduced by some trashy seaside chateau, with teal and coral decor. Or anonymous condo development, thriving like a border town along death’s barbed wire.

No, my father was smarter than that, and thriftier. For the house he had chosen, as the pictures that arrived a day later showed, was a funky double-wide trailer. Being a New Englander, he was temperamentally incapable of springing for anything more. In this, at least, I could take some consolation.